Be Aware: Invisibility and Blogging

“The frustration of feeling so ill and looking quite well can be demoralising and infuriating. Recently I read the blog post of someone with M.E. who was so desperate to be understood that she wished she could look more ill so that people would realise how ill she felt: so that the face matched the suffering.

There’s the dilemma for people with an invisible illness:

we want to be free of the illness but that option isn’t available;

we want people to recognise our pain and struggle but that’s not necessarily an option because we often don’t look as ill as we feel so we are lumbered with looking quite well, feeling quite awful and needing some way of straddling the line between what we experience and how we are perceived.”